Sociocultural and historical approaches to translation research have tended to take a critical stance to translation universals (see Paloposki, 2002; Tymoczko, 1998). It is generally typical of sociohistorical views to emphasise the particular over the general, and accordingly this research has problematised excessively simple notions of translation. In the lightm of historical examples it becomes clear that there are cases where it may be very difficult to identify a source language, let alone a source text. In addition, sometimes considerable liberties have been taken with source texts, resulting in major transformations that rule out direct comparisons at a linguistic level.

As noted earlier, translations have also been instrumental in bringing new genres and text types into new cultures, which means that domestic counterparts did not yet exist; thus the foundation for a comparative study, the existence of pairs of texts, does not materialise.

Social constraints may weaken the comparability of texts even if source texts and their translations are identifiable without problems. The social status of translations is not homogeneous but genre-dependent. Another important factor is what Toury (1995) calls 'preliminary norms', that is, translation policies which determine, for example, the selection of texts for translation. It is also true that translations are unevenly distributed across the genres of the target culture, and across source languages: for a given language pair, more tends to get translated in one direction than the other, and translations in one direction can be differently biased for social factors like prestige, or the date of the original. The ensuing dilemma is that the comparability of texts conflicts with the objective of reflecting prevailing preliminary norms, although an ambitious corpus would wish to incorporate both criteria.

Social factors of these kinds are possible sources of systematic bias in large databases, and impose limitations on their comparability. However, while such constraints must be borne in mind, they do not invalidate the search for generality, as it is inconceivable that we would be able to compile ideally homogeneous databases of real language and real translations. A search for generality cannot assume perfect homogeneity of the research object; what it strives for is the search for what is common and shared within the variation.

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